![]() ![]() ![]() “It was an extremely time consuming and inefficient process,” according to Geoff Labe, Haverford’s director of conferences, events, and campus center services. Addresses were often incomplete or incorrect, creating extra work. Until a few years ago, Haverford College sorted its student mail the old-fashioned way: the mail center received and logged hundreds of parcels each day, printed a pick-up notification for each one, in quadruplicate, and placed one copy of the slip in a student mailbox. If packages then go missing, students are disappointed, or peeved, and the reputations of mail centers suffer. It also means that items do not move rapidly through mail centers and to their recipients. Particularly in older facilities, packages must be logged manually, which is a time-consuming and thus costly process. But that doesn’t mean that they actually pick up their packages promptly. Students who find goods online in seconds might click “buy” hoping that purchases will arrive at campuses in hours. And often the centers don’t have room for expansion. Often packages go missing, are misplaced or misdirected. Some 50 percent of students report doing at least some of their back-to-school shopping online.Ĭare packages arrive year-round, but holidays, particularly Valentine’s Day, bring tsunamis of candy and other gifts, while at Halloween it’s costumes in often-bulky boxes.Īs the volume of deliveries grows, mail centers struggle, because they were not designed for such traffic. Move-in days bring course-assigned books, supplies, and dorm-room furniture, some of it quite large, like mini-fridges. Those large, box-shaped vehicles are becoming less prominent on campuses because increasingly companies like Amazon have turned to the United States Postal Service to get purchases to campus destinations.Ĭampus mail centers are most overloaded at certain times of the year, managers say. Until a few years ago, the most common method of getting shipments to students was via delivery trucks. The boom has transformed campus mail centers, and overwhelmed many, mail center managers’ report. No wonder shipping volume to campuses is growing at 13 percent annually. Each year they spend $6.9 billion shopping online. But today an avalanche of goods comes to American college students. A large percentage of higher-ed administrators probably received just a few packages a year during their own days of living on a campus. In the physical realm, as in the digital, online shopping has reshaped campus life. But the purchases end up in students’ physical spaces. They may be in dorm rooms, cafeterias, or libraries searching online for purchases. Regardless of all that digitization, students on any campus still live in an offline world. Nationally, for example, 41 percent of college students take college courses online ̶- most even while enrolled on a campus. Strikingly, students complain little about being under such digital microscopes as long as colleges provide them with plenty of digital assistance for their modern-day campus lives, which increasingly have digitized components. The programs borrow from big data sampling methods to gauge how students’ activities might be helping or hindering their academic and personal well-being. Some campuses have even installed software suites that track students minutely via their mobile phones, 24 hours a day. Virtual counselors help students to deal with the stresses of campus life. Plagiarism-detection software catches students who omit to cite their sources. Big data algorithms crunch away to provide administrators with hints on how to retain students. With astonishing speed, campuses have become some of the most online, digitized places in modern society.Ĭomputerized chatbots advise students about admissions and course registrations. ![]()
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